Land rovers are notorious for breaking down. If you look at any reliability data for cars, land rovers consistently rank at or near the bottom. http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2013/02/land-rover-and-jd-power/

My argument is the treasury didn't have to sell and take a loss. They could have left the stock on its balance sheet as stock.

The whole point of the bailout was to prevent a systemic collapse of the US economy. A GM failure would have probably caused losses upwards of 105 billion dollars of lost tax revenue (http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/09/news/companies/gm-bailout-stock-sale/), which is paltry in context of the direct loss of 10 Billion.

The treasury would have had to sold it at 53 USD to break even on the stock. Today's price is around 41 USD. I don't think it would be unusual to see a move closer to 53, as long there is no major calamity in the general economy or through the performance of GM.

The treasury sold it voluntarily. The treasury could have waited until the price was non-loss making.

Lets say you get (god forbid) cancer. What do you do then? Or in an accident? Or whatever. This is probably the worst advice I've heard-- not getting health insurance.

use a bidet or as in asia http://www.minishower.net/minish_commode.html

we need an energy/oil based currency, whereby all goods are priced in barrels of oil.

Lets say you owned a business that was returning 30% per year on the amount invested by you, why would you want a dividend? The best you can do with a risk free cash investment is 3-5% in the bank, if even.

In a vacuum if the continually resulted in a 30% return, it would be better to compound your money there.
The key thing is you need to buy stocks cheap ie as close to per share book value as you can.

Foxconn makes terrible margins on their product. (10-14 %)

Why on earth does it make sense to buy foxconn? Foxconn does not have anything proprietary that a dozen other assembly mfg companies in China can do.

One big thing is taxes:

share buy backs would not incur a double taxation that a dividend might.

This is already happening:
http://www.magna.com/en/capabilities/vehicle-engineering-contract-manufacturing
http://www.valmet-automotive.com/automotive/cms.nsf

If you have a problem with this, buy new balance:

http://www.newbalance.com/company/committed-to-american-workers/?action=recommendContent&pageID=%2Fcompany%2Fcommitted-to-american-workers%2F%23comment6761&pageTitle=Committed%20to%20American%20Workers

In addition, you can even select shoes by either made in america or assembled in america (less than 60% american content).

I think Edison and Westinghouse is a more appropriate comparison.

Hi As second degrees, I would suggest going into operations research and systems management. Learn industrial design and theories of manufacturing and manufacturability if you can. Most programs heavily gloss over those two subjects. The entire automobile industry is based on large scale manufacturing and eking out as much cost out of their parts. If your insight can reduce the cost and reduce waste while improve performance, then that will give you a leg up on the competition. Auto manufacturing hinges on suppliers and sub suppliers and knowing how to get as much productivity out of limited resources.

After reading the email-- project camden stood out.

I did a quick google search and came up with this

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=bd97a8f9b4c3bf8393ff69b58026ffb1&_cview=0
"The NexGenCI project seeks to significantly upgrade existing x-ray backscatter, whole-body-imaging, bulk detection portals already in use by the TSA"

/tinfoil hat...

I have tmobile, with an andorid. I pay 25 USD for unlimited data and thethering. The first 2 gigs per month are unrestricted and after that they throttle me. I quite happy with this arrangement. (never exceeded 2 gigs for tethering). Its fast too.